The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

FNM Deputy Leader Loretta Butler Turner addressed a Rotary Club of South East Nassau meeting yesterday on the theme, “Rethinking the Social Compact.”

During her speech, Ms Turner said many agreements between the government and its citizens need to be revisited, and that the government must look for another form of revenue generation as customs duties have proven “inadequate”.

The Long Island MP said: “A social compact is simply the mutual agreement(s) that citizens, individually or collectively in the form of groups or institutions, have with the state for the well-being and the good order of society.”

She added: “At 40 years of independence we have to rethink a number of often unspoken, but widely-held agreements between citizens and their government that we have long taken for granted.

“So, the question is, what sources of revenue should we turn in order to meet the needs of today’s Bahamas? Answering this question requires a renegotiation of the social compact.

“This renegotiation between citizens and government involves what kinds, combinations and levels of taxes that we may agree upon in order to provide for the kind of government we wish to have.

“One idea proposed to boost government revenue is that of a Value Added Tax or VAT. I make no comment here today on this idea, except to say this,” she said.